Monetizing a Site Through AdSense

There is a lot of misconception about Google AdSense; many marketers see it as one of the most rudimentary ways to monetize your site. As such many markets prefer to build affiliate sites, spend an age writing sales driven content, building email lists to try and sell on the back end, but the most important aspect of getting the sale is completely taking out of their hands, once you send traffic to the merchant they are the ones you have to rely on to push your traffic through their checkout page. If the merchant you are promoting has a poor sales funnel you will suffer.

This is not the case with AdSense, once you get the click then your job is done and your money is in the bank of Google.

When you build a site around AdSense in many ways it’s different to that of an affiliate site. The perfect traffic for an AdSense site is click happy information hungry searchers. This is not the case for an affiliate site, most affiliates will target traffic that are close to making a purchase and hopefully they are just looking for some final reassurances that the product they plan to buy will meet their needs. These typical searches can include “reviews” “best price” or one of favourites is “warranty” for instance how long is the warranty on a Sony camcorder. As you can imagine these keywords get a tiny amount of searches every month but they are super targeted and can lead to the highest conversions.

If you target these types of searches with an AdSense site you may not get enough traffic to make the site pay and as the searchers have a very specific goal you will often find that they are unwilling to click on your ad.

Choosing your keywords and finding a click happy market

The most important thing to remember about an AdSense site is that it’s a numbers game, in every part of it you want to have the numbers on your side, ideally the more the better.
Keeping the numbers on your side starts with the keyword research, you want to try and find between 5 and 10 possible candidates. The same rules apply as always, use Google’s keyword tool, try and find keywords with a minimum of 2500 searches and months, with a CPC of at least .50 cents ( remember this is split between you again Google, 60:40 in your favour). If you have tools like Market Samurai or Micro Niche finder, use them! they will make this process so much easier

Now to find if any of these keywords have click happy searchers

Knowing that you are entering a market that has potential to be profitable for you is a great incentive to drive on and make it work. To try and take as much guess work out of this as possible you will need to do quite a lot of ground work. You may be putting a lot of work in now with little reward, but it’s better to do it now than to spend 6 months working on a site with little or nothing to show at the end.

The best way I have found to test the potential of a new niche is to write an article on all of your chosen keywords and submit them to ezinearticles. (Note: as we have not registered any domains yet, you will need to link your biobox to some other site), It may sound strange to be doing this but there is method in the madness and there are 2 good reasons, firstly ezinearticles has the ability to rank highly for your keyword, giving you an indication of how tough the competition is and after about a month you will have an idea of which keyword has the best potential. Just look for the article that has the highest CTR (click through rate). Because they have clicked your link, they are hungry to learn more and are willing to click on your link.

Building Your Site

Now it’s back to the numbers game, you need as many articles as possible for your new site, more articles means more searchers which will mean more clicks. Each article you write should back up the main theme of your site but focus on a slightly different key phrase.
Another important aspect of the articles you write is to try and build in some relative or related keywords into each article, doing this will give you a better chance of attracting more long tail searches. If your site is about remote control helicopters, try to work in some brand names, “how to fix” or any keywords that would make sense, a lot of information based searches are based around asking a question like “how do I fix my broken Helicopter” if you can build this into your copy you will have a great chance of ranking for these types of searches. In most cases when you write the article you will be doing this anyway, this technique is commonly known as LSI or latent semantic indexing.

The length of the article will really depend on your own preferences but I prefer to write pretty meaty articles, anything up to 1500 words. I do this for 2 reasons, I can easily target a lot more potential long tails and I can hit the reader with 3 different ad boxes as they scroll down the page. Getting ads clicked in the very top ad box will usually yield the biggest CPC, but if you miss your chance here, hitting them a second and third time will treble your chances of getting your ad clicked.

Link building
The same rules apply here, but there is one thing I have found with my AdSense sites and that is they can attract natural links more easily. I think in part it’s because of the articles I write help to answer a question but also, AdSense sites are less conspicuous compared to affiliates sites and people are more willing to link to them.

AdSense is really underrated as a viable way to monetize your site, I believe many people turn to it as a last option when all their affiliate offers fail and because the site was not built for AdSense most times these sites will under preform leaving the owner bemused with the miserable amount of money they are making.